"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Monday, August 6, 2012

August 6, 1928: Andy Warhol is born

Andy Warhol, one of the most influential artists of the latter part of the 20th century, is born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A frail and diminutive man with a shock of silver-blond hair, Warhol was a major pioneer of the pop art movement of the 1960s but later outgrew that role to become a cultural icon.

Warhol
was the son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a
coal miner. For years, there was confusion as to his exact date and
place of birth because Warhol gave conflicting accounts of these
details, probably out of embarrassment of his provincial origins. "I'd
prefer to remain a mystery," he once said. "I never give my background
and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked." He
enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon
University) and graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949.
That year, he moved to New York City,
where he found work as a commercial illustrator. After being
incorrectly credited as "Warhol" under an early published drawing, he
decided to permanently remove the "a" from his last name.

He began painting in the late 1950s
and took literally the advice of an art teacher who said he should
paint the things he liked. He liked ordinary things, such as comic
strips, canned soup, and soft drinks, and so he painted them. In 1962,
he received notoriety in the art world when his paintings of Campbell's
soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap-pad
boxes were exhibited in Los Angeles and New York.

In
1963, he dispensed with the paintbrush and began mass-producing images
of consumer goods and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie
Kennedy. These prints, accomplished through his use of a silk-screen
technique, displayed multiple versions of the same image in garish
colors and became his trademark. He was hailed as the leader of the pop
art movement, in which Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others depicted
"popular" images such as a soup can or comic strip as a means of fusing
high and low culture and commenting on both.

Although shy and
soft-spoken, Warhol attracted dozens of followers who were anything but.
This mob of underground artists, social curiosities, and hangers-on
operated out of the "Factory," Warhol's silver-painted studio in
Manhattan. In the mid-1960s, Warhol began making experimental films,
employing his friends as actors and billing them as "superstars." Some
of his films were monumental essays on boredom, such as the eight-hour
continuous shot of the Empire State Building in Empire (1964), and others were gritty representations of underground life, like The Chelsea Girls
(1966). He also organized multimedia events such as "The Exploding
Plastic Inevitable" and sponsored the influential rock group the Velvet
Underground. In 1968, Warhol was shot and nearly killed by Valerie
Solanis, a follower who claimed he was "exercising too much influence"
over her life.

After more than a year of recuperation from his wounds, Warhol returned to his career and founded Interview
magazine, a publication centered on his fascination with the cult of
celebrity. He became a fixture on the fashion and jet-set social scenes
and was famous for pithy cultural observations like, "In the future,
everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Meanwhile, he continued to
produce commercially successful silk-screen prints of entertainment and
political figures.

In the 1980s,
after a period of relative quiet in his career, he returned to the
contemporary art scene as a mentor and friend to a new generation of
artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. With the rise
of postmodern art, he came to be regarded as an archetypal role model by
many young artists. On February 22, 1987, he died in the hospital of a
heart attack shortly after a gall bladder operation. In 1994, the Andy
Warhol Museum, the largest single-artist museum in the United States, opened in Pittsburgh.